Are you deepooperit?

We often don’t think about funny words that we use in our day-to-day language, but we certainly use them.  Author Adam Jacot de Boinod has just penned his second book of weird and wonderful words called The Wonder of Whiffling and Other Extraordinary Words in the English Language, the follow-up to The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinary Words From Around the World.

In each book, he explains the origins of many of the world’s strangest words, the likes of which will make you giggle.  You might want to check out his interesting and amusing blog as well, where you’ll find fascinating explanations of words from around the globe.

I took the fun quiz that was offered here, based on words from his book and got the fabulous score of one out of ten. (The site called me a jobbernowl….a blockhead…but I refuse to be offended.)  I think I’ll get out my dictionary and do a little studying before I take another quiz like this one, but it was fun anyway.

Too much time on their hands…or art?

We’ve all seen this beautiful and amazing alphabet print, done completely with photos of butterfly wings by artist Kjell Blach Sandved. It seems that this popular item has produced a few imitations, although maybe not a form of flattery in some of theses instances.

What about the hamburger alphabet, made by Robert Bolesta who bought the ground beef, hand-shaped it and packaged each letter to make his own creation.

Craig Ward decided that hair would be his medium of choice, although I think it is a bit creepy, myself.  You decide.

One really fun idea is a matchbook sign language alphabet, created by JK Keller.

You can see more of this collection of alphabets right here. It might inspire you to try one of your own.

Glottochronology

Planning on traveling into the past?  Have you just discovered a time machine that will bring you back to the days of the caveman?  What will you say to the people you find there or will you be able to communicate at all?  In almost every movie where someone travels to the past, they encounter people and after only minutes, are able to communicate freely with them.  Is this really possible?  Some scientists think it is…to a point.

The study of glottochronology is based on the idea that language changes at a constant average rate which should allow us to be able to trace the changes in language through history, thus making it possible for us to figure out how to “speak” the English language during any part of history.  Does this really work?  It assumes that there are words that essentially do not change, such as “I”, “who”, “two”, “five” and “thou”, and words that will disappear from the language after a short period of time (words in our vocabulary such as “stick”, “dirty”, “guts” and “squeeze”.) So if you do pop back in time, try to avoid those words if you want to fit in with the locals.

Here is an example of a language being traced. (Courtesy of Alexander Bainbridge at his blog TransCaucasus.)

You can read more about the idea right here.

Adopt a word!

Larry over at the Fire Wire found another great site called “Save the Words”. The site is funny , with cute little voices as you run your mouse over the words scattered around the page saying “Me. Pick me!”.  The people at Save the Words would like us all to be aware that words from the English language disappear every day because they are just not used anymore.  So, to save the words, they ask that you adopt a word for a day, use it in your conversation and thus, the word will not disappear.  You can select your own word or they can choose one for you at random.

I wonder though, if you started using these words often enough, would you begin to sound like you just stepped out of a time machine?  I’m thinking that it might start to sounds a bit weird to use words like “sparsile” or “mulomedic” during an office meeting or while you’re out for lunch with the girls.  But, it is a fun concept.

The dictionary

Erin McKean is one of the youngest editors of one of the “big five” in American Dictionaries.  She is striving to reshape the way we look at dictionaries as well as the English language.

If you’ve never heard of it, TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) started out as a conference to bring people from all of these worlds together in order to share their knowledge with each other.  It is an annual conference now which brings together people from all over the world, each one challenged to give the talk of their lives….all in under 18 minutes.  This particular video of Erin McKean is one such talk.  Take your time and enjoy it!

Why would I want to wash my clothes in THAT?!

I was reading a blog this morning about the way products marketed throughout the world can have problems with translation, depending on the language.  For example, this little box of “Barf” above is actually a very popular detergent used in Iran.  To those of us who speak English, we wonder why anyone would call a cleaning product barf, but in Farsi (an Iranian language) the word barf actually translates as “snow”. Apparently, even though the company is aware that this has a negative translation into English, they have decided to keep the name the same.

Urban legends abound when referring to products and translations.  There are many items that have claims about their English translations (or translations into other languages), but many of these are just that….urban legends. To read more about this issue, you can visit this link.

Branding products can be tricky enough, but when language becomes an issue, there can be a whole new set of problems.  Urban legend or actual translation, words will always amuse us.